The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb, by Agatha Christie
Read it here in about 30 minutes.
In honour of the Liars’ League’s upcoming Agatha Christie themed short story event, thinking about Agatha Christie’s legacy as Queen of Crime and Mystery…
Christie travelled a great deal throughout her lifetime, and you can see her using that passion and experience from the very opening of this story, as it’s set in Egypt, a place she was familiar with. She also links to real world events, namely the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, which happened the year before this story was first published, and utilises the related ‘curse of the mummy’ as part of her plot.
This story features Christie’s famous Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, and his sidekick Captain Hastings. None of the Poirot novels or short stories are narrated by Poirot himself – they are narrated either in first-person by a secondary character, such as Hastings, which is the case for this story, or in third-person by an objective non-character narrator; this allows Christie to keep the reader out of the detective’s head, meaning the mystery remains a mystery until Poirot is ready to reveal the solution at the very end of the story.
One of the features of the Poirot stories featuring Hastings, as with the Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson stories that came before them, is that this particular sidekick is always wildly incorrect in his understanding of the clues, and incredulous of Poirot’s reasoning, and he therefore requires Poirot to fully explain the solution to him. This also helps the reader to avoid any doubt as to who did the murdering, and why.
Mina Ma 